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Fertility Decline and Women's Empowerment in China

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Fertility Decline and Women's Empowerment in China Fertility Decline and Women’s Empowerment in China Xiaogang Wu, PhD Hua Ye Gloria Guangye He August 2012 006-2012-ICRW-FE August 2012 006-2012-ICRW-FE © 2012 International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). Portions of this report may be reproduced without express permission from but with acknowledgment to ICRW. RECOMMENDED CITATION Wu, Xiaogang, Hua Ye and Gloria Guangye He. (2012).Fertility Decline and Women’s Empowerment in China. International Center for Research on Women Fertility & Empowerment Working Paper Series. 006-2012-ICRW-FE. Pages 1-35. THE FERTILITY & EMPOWERMENT NETWORK The Fertility & Empowerment (F&E) Network is a group of academic and applied researchers committed to reinvigorating the connection between gender, fertility decline and development through both theoretical and applied research. The F&E Network is housed at the International Center for Research on Women and funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The F&E Network aims to advance a research agenda on issues intersecting these three themes that is of interest to researchers and policymakers alike, and to support the professional development of experienced and emerging scholars with an interest in gender and population. Fertility & Empowerment Network members have conducted a series of case studies addressing whether and to what extent fertility declines in lower and middle income countries have led to gains in women’s well-being, women’s empowerment or transformations to gender equality. The F&E Working Paper Series serves as a platform for the collective presentation of this rich body of work. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ICRW and the Fertility & Empowerment Network gratefully acknowledge funding and support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Fertility & Empowerment Network wishes to thank Consultative Group members Alaka Basu, Sunita Kishor, Karen Mason, Tom Merrick, Susan Newcomer, and Herb Smith for their conceptual and technical expert guidance on network efforts. In addition, the network greatly benefitted from the support of Ann Biddlecom, Jay Gribble, and Amy Tsui toward developing an actionable research agenda. 2 Wu, et al. Fertility Decline and Women’s Empowerment in China Xiaogang Wu* Hua Ye Gloria Guangye He ABSTRACT The literature typically treats fertility decline in developing countries as an indicator of women’s status improvement, based on the assumption that women have greater decision making power on childbearing as their status improves. This paper investigates whether and how fertility decline leads to reduction in gender inequality and the improvement of women’s status in China. Based on the analyses of data from two nationally representative surveys, we show that women with lower fertility do less housework and tend to be more satisfied with their status within family than women with higher fertility. Such effects are more pronounced for women in more recent marital cohorts. Across generations, lower fertility implies fewer siblings and daughters benefit more in terms of years of schooling and subsequently occupational attainment __________________________________________________________________ *Corresponding author: Xiaogang Wu, [email protected] ; Professor, Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. Hua Ye, [email protected] ; The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Gloria Guangye He, [email protected] ; The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 3 August 2012 006-2012-ICRW-FE INTRODUCTION During the past four decades, China, like other developing countries, has experienced a dramatic decline in fertility. This decline reflects a number of key demographic and policy changes. The 1950s witnessed a population boom in China (Bongaarts and Greenhalgh 1985). While the country’s birth rate remained at around 35 per thousand, the death rate halved from 20 per thousand to about 10 per thousand from 1949 to 1965, with an exception for the period of the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine (Scharping 2003). 1 The decline in the death rate was largely due to improvement in healthcare and recovery from years of war. Consequently, the first decades of the People’s Republic witnessed a rapid population growth from 541,670,000 in 1952 to 829,920,000 in 1970, reaching a peak in the natural growth rate of 33.33 per thousand in 1963 (National Bureau of Statistics 2009, p. 1), due to both the increase in fertility and decline in mortality. Concerned that overpopulation could hinder economic development and the improvement of living standards, the Chinese government rolled out the first national birth control campaign in 1971, with the slogan “later-longer-fewer” ( Wan Xi Shao ), referring to later marriage, longer birth spacing, and fewer children (Bongaarts and Greenhalgh 1985; Presser et al. 2006). A more stringent one- child policy was implemented when China started its economic reform in 1978. To limit the total population to 1.2 billion by 2000, the new Constitution of the People’s Republic of China in 1978 declared state advocacy for birth planning, and the Marriage Law of 1980 required every couple to abide by the birth control policy (Bongaarts and Greenhalgh 1985). As a result, as shown in Figure 1, the total fertility rate dropped from 5.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2.7 in 1979, and was further reduced to 1.5 by the late 1990s (Poston et al. 2006). __________________________________________________________________ 1 The Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961 was an economic and social campaign of the Chinese Communist Party, which aimed to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern communist society through the process of rapid industrialization and collectivization. The campaign ended in catastrophe, resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths (Peng 1987). 4 Wu, et al. Figure 1: China’s Total Fertility Rate, 1950-1998 Source: Table 1.1 on page 12 of Poston et al. (2006). Scholars studying fertility decline in developing countries tend to focus on changing gender relationships and improvement of women’s status as key causes of fertility decline (Mason 1987). Women’s education and labor force participation are two common indictors of women’s’ socioeconomic status. In many developing countries, education increases at a faster pace for women than it does for men and gender gaps in schooling are also shrinking (Buchmann and Hannum 2001). Consequently, female labor force participation has increased in most countries and women have gained more economic independence over time (Brinton, Lee, and Parish 1995; Buchmann, DiPrete, and Anne McDaniel 2008; Yu 2005). Empirical research has shown that fertility is negatively associated with women’s education and employment (Axinn and Barber 2001; Mason 1987), not only because women’s improved education exposes them to modern values and ideas that emphasize individualism and gender egalitarianism (Inglehart and Norris 2003), but also because women’s economic independence enables them to decide for themselves the number of children they wish to have (Mason 1987). In other words, the argument has been that women’s empowerment--as measured by their increasing educational 5 August 2012 006-2012-ICRW-FE attainment and labor force participation--has contributed to fertility decline (Jejeebhoy 1995; Lam and Duryea 1999). In the case of China, the socialist state has long played a strong role in both promoting gender equality and controlling fertility. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong envisioned a China in which women would “hold up half the sky” and called for “genuine equality” between men and women under the new regime. As Mao Zedong (1955) put it, “In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad mass of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole .” This vision of gender equality was mixed with ideas of nation building and labor mobilization, and socialist egalitarianism was pushed by communist social policy during a particular period of the revolt against traditional patriarchy in Chinese society (Honig and Hershatter 1988). As a result, female labor force participation reached a very high level in the socialist period. According to data from the 1982 census, 85.3 percent of Chinese women ages 15 to 54 (excluding students and retirees) held a job, far higher than any other country with a similar level of economic development, and also higher than other Chinese societies such as Hong Kong or Taiwan (National Bureau of Statistics 2005). Chinese women’s high rate of labor force participation since the 1950s was a direct consequence not so much of their improved educational opportunities relative to men’s, but of government intervention (Hannum and Xie 1994; Lu and Treiman 2008). Indeed, gender inequality in education fluctuated in the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, and only in recent years has the country witnessed a dramatic improvements in women’s education relative to men’s, largely due to economic development and educational expansion since the 1980s (Hannum 2005; Ye and Wu 2011). Wu and Zhang (2010) reported that women’s disadvantage in education has been reversed among the youngest cohort. 6 Wu, et al. Ironically, whereas Chinese women have started catching up in educational attainment in recent decades, their labor force participation rate has been falling since the mid-1980s from 82.1 percent in 1985 to 67.5 percent in 2008, 2 as shown in Figure 2. This trend was due to economic restructuring in the 1990s, during which middle-aged women were more likely to be laid off (Wu 2010). Figure 2. Rate of Female Labor Force Participation in China, 1985-2008 85 83 81 79 77 75 73 71 69 67 65 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 19951997199920012003 2005 2007 Data Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China, China Economic Statistical Yearbook ; China InfoBank (http://www.infobank.cn/ ).
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